The Hemphill Stringtet

Julius Hemphill compositions, played by a string quartet

The Hemphill Stringtet: L-R Curtis Stewart, Sam Bardfeld, Stephanie Griffin, Tomeka Reid

Ivo! Ivo! Ivo! Jazz critic and former Fantasy Records tape archivist/reissue producer Stuart Kremsky blogs at Mr. Stu’s Record Room. He recently reviewed seven albums by Ivo Perelman, including Polarity 3 (Burning Ambulance Music, 2024), about which he wrote:

The duo of Ivo Perelman & Nate Wooley brings together two fearless improvisers, each committed to exploring and extending the limits of their instruments. Tenor saxophonist Perelman and trumpeter Wooley have recorded together in a number of settings since 2017. Polarity 3 marks the third occasion that they’ve played in duo format. Over the course of just over an hour, the pair continues to display the mesmerizing playfulness that characterizes their encounters. The instant music that they create ranges from genuinely calm unisons (the opening track) to brief outbreaks of brutal noise and so much more. I get the distinct feeling that the musicians were just as surprised at the sounds they were making as the home listener is likely to be. Wooley’s extended vocabulary of bleats, blasts, and blurred runs is balanced by smooth and rounded passages of pure trumpet. Perelman likewise runs the gamut of soaring melodies, gritty rumblings in the bottom end, squeaks, burbles, and skittish squiggles in the extreme upper ranges of the sax. There are so many beautiful moments to savor: the moody calmness of Two, the duel of matching wits in the upper registers on Five, the growly noodling on Eight, and so much more. Bold and absorbing music that deserves to be heard again and again.

Buy Polarity 3 on Bandcamp. (If you haven’t heard the earlier volumes, we’re running a special deal — all three CDs for $35 plus shipping.)

The other week, US Senator Cory Booker gave a 26-hour speech in order to protest… well, pretty much everything going on in US politics and government at the moment. I bring that up not to talk politics, but because partway through the event someone asked on Bluesky, “What would you talk about for 19 hours?” and my response was:

How “free jazz” is an umbrella term used to encompass multiple discrete, unique compositional languages, all of which are codifiable, learnable and transmissible, and how there’s no such thing as “pure” improvisation.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. At one point, I was working on a book proposal that would have explored the work of seven legendary avant-garde jazz musicians and discussed them as composers: Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Bill Dixon, Roscoe Mitchell, Cecil Taylor, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill. That project didn’t come to fruition, obviously. Eventually, I decided to focus on Taylor alone, and In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor is available in bookstores now. (Get it from Amazon, Abebooks, Dusty Groove, or direct from the publisher.)

For that reason and several others, I’m glad I didn’t write that book. It would have been surface-level at best, because I don’t know enough about composition to really explain what these men have done in a way that would provide value to the reader. Also, the list is incomplete. There are many other composer/performers of their era whose work deserves analysis, and Julius Hemphill is a big one.

A reed player from Fort Worth, Texas, Hemphill moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 1968, where he co-founded the Black Artists Group. In the mid ’70s, he moved to New York, where he co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with fellow BAG members Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett, and California transplant David Murray. Hemphill also led groups of various sizes, from trios up to a big band; performed solo and with poets; and composed chamber music. He died 30 years ago last week, on April 2, 1995.

Hemphill had a unique compositional voice, and a particular gift for rich, Ellingtonian arrangements. But his pieces mostly exist on his own records; they’re not often recorded by other artists. A new album embraces his legacy as a composer and arranger in a fascinating way. The Hemphill Stringtet is a string quartet co-led by violinist Sam Bardfeld and cellist Tomeka Reid, with second violinist Curtis Stewart and violist Stephanie Griffin, and their debut album, Plays The Music Of Julius Hemphill, is exactly what that title implies.

The album opens with a version of “Revue”, a piece Hemphill wrote for the World Saxophone Quartet; it appears on their 1982 album of the same name. The next three tracks are Mingus Gold, a three-part reworking of Charles Mingus’s “Nostalgia in Times Square”, “Alice’s Wonderland”, and “Better Git Hit in Your Soul” that Hemphill created for the Kronos Quartet. (A previous recording, by the Daedalus Quartet, appears in the Hemphill box set The Boyé Multi-National Crusade For Harmony, released in 2021.) The album concludes with a medley of “My First Winter” and “Touchic”, both from the WSQ’s Live In Zurich, and “Choo Choo”, from At Dr. King’s Table, a posthumous collection of pieces recorded by a saxophone sextet led by Marty Ehrlich.

I emailed Sam Bardfeld and Tomeka Reid to learn about the project — how it got started, how they chose and arranged the music, and whether it’s a one-off or a project likely to continue.

“The quartet’s origin was a little serendipitous”, Bardfeld told me. “I ran into Marty Ehrlich at a gig in Brooklyn and he told me that he had just published the World Saxophone Quartet music in an edition for strings and suggested I play them. I touched base with Tomeka — she and I were both huge Hemphill fans already — who said Peter Margasak had just asked her to put together a group to play Mingus Gold at Chicago’s 2022 Frequency Festival. We agreed to ask Curtis and Stephanie to join us. Besides being great improvisers, each co-leads a string quartet that deals extensively with contemporary classical music — Curtis with the Publiq Quartet and Stephanie with the Momenta Quartet. We all enjoyed playing together and playing this music so we kept going.”

Reid added, “For me this is the ideal context in which to engage with traditional string quartet instrumentation, by way of the compositions of amazing jazz and creative music artists like Julius Hemphill. Sam Bardfeld had also learned of these pieces and we decided to ask Curtis and Stephanie to join us as they are both stellar improvisors. We also added some of the World Saxophone Quartet pieces to the mix that we enjoyed playing to round out the program.”

One of Hemphill’s most important creative relationships was with cellist Abdul Wadud. They recorded together on several of the saxophonist’s key albums, including Dogon A.D., ’Coon Bid’ness, Raw Materials And Residuals, and the duo disc Live In New York, and there’s an entire disc of additional, undated sax/cello duos in the Boyé box. (And don’t miss his solo album, By Myself, which was reissued in 2023.)

Just over a decade ago, Reid and Joel Wanek interviewed Wadud for Point of Departure. I asked Reid how his playing on Hemphill’s records might have inspired her own work.

“Abdul was such an excellent cellist and has inspired me to really use the whole range of the instrument”, she replied. “He has a great sound and rhythmic sensibility and that is something that I strive for in my own playing.” In the liner notes to the album, she adds, “Abdul Wadud, what can I say? A total giant and a deep voice in this music. (And the synergy between him and Hemphill was indeed magical.) His technique was impeccable, with the bow or pizzicato: You could hear the whole history of the music in his playing and he could weave in and out of styles effortlessly.”

Mingus Gold had actually been written for string quartet by Hemphill, but I was curious how the arrangements of the other pieces worked. Were they just transposing melodies from saxophones to strings, or was there something more to it?

Bardfeld explained, “The four World Saxophone Quartet pieces we played are head charts. Marty Ehrlich, who’s in charge of the Hemphill archive at NYU, edited three volumes of Julius’ sax quartets and then put out the same volumes for string quartet [through] Subito Publishing — I think the only difference is the key signatures. We came up with the arrangements. There’s a lot of improvised polyphony in the World Saxophone Quartet which is one of the things I love about them. A lot of multiple soloing at the same time. So we tried to preserve some of that ethos. ‘Revue’, the opener, starts with the melody, followed by a little collective improvising, short improvised statements by everyone in the group, and then more collective playing. We made a medley out of ‘My First Winter’ and ‘Touchic’. ‘Winter’ is a ballad with Curtis taking a loose melody statement, followed by my solo over the changes. I keep soloing while the group dissolves into a free transition into ‘Touchic’. We transition into the head and then feature Stephanie’s improvising over a loose odd-meter ostinato. This transitions into collective blowing before taking the head out. On ‘Choo-Choo’, we play the head and then the blowing is all collective, moving outward from the central riff.”

Mingus Gold was through-composed, but Hemphill indicated a space at the end of the second movement, where Reid creates an improvised cello cadenza. In the third movement, he wrote out a duet passage for the two violins, but Bardfeld said, “Curtis and I are both improvisers, [so] we lost the ink on this and improvised our duet. Tomeka and Stephanie join us at the end for a bit of a melee before we go back to the ink.”

Reid added, “In some of the pieces we reorganized the double stops to be more playable in some passages and even spread them out over three voices instead of two when it made sense to do so.” She also mentioned that they listened to the Daedalus Quartet’s version of Mingus Gold as a reference early on.

Bardfeld said, “The Daedalus is a straight classical group and we’re kind of a hybrid jazz-classical quartet, so our interpretation is naturally different. It was certainly helpful to have a recording of it, though.”

There’s plenty of Hemphill material that could be rearranged for the Stringtet, so a second album is certainly possible. Bardfeld said, “Marty Ehrlich recently sent us an arrangement of [Billy Strayhorn’s] ‘Lush Life’ of his for us to consider. I think we would be open to exploring more of the World Saxophone Quartet pieces when we all have a bit more time to get together to work on some new material.”

Reid added, “Hemphill wrote a piano quintet for the great pianist Ursula Oppens (his companion) and string quartet called One Atmosphere. We’ve had preliminary chats with Ursula about it. Ursula is lovely and has been very supportive of our quartet. There’s loads more World Saxophone Quartet pieces to play, both published and unpublished… There’s also the possibility of arranging something iconic like ‘Dogon A.D.’ for the ensemble. There’s so much great music that Julius wrote. I think we’d also be open to looking at some of the work written by some of Julius’ contemporaries. All things to discuss!”

That’s it for now. See you on Friday, when I will be asking you to buy some music by saxophonist Joe Maneri and sharing links to articles of interest with paying subscribers.